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Last week, Denver got a visit from the President's Advisory Board on Race, and the process of conciliation began with speakers being shouted down by activists who seemed to argue that if the board didn't have an American Indian on it, then the board was somehow invalid.
This demand has a certain logic at first, but who should be on the board to speak for all Native Americans?
As Robert Berkhofer pointed out in an excellent book
(The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from
Columbus to the Present), the concept of Indian-ness
is a European construction.
Indigenous peoples of the Americas did not think of
themselves as belonging to some great united continental
population of Indians
or Native
Americans.
Instead, they deemed themselves Dineh (Navajo) or Nuche
(Utes), not Indians.
A Ute warrior of 1850 would
have been insulted to learn that anyone thought he had
anything in common with an Arapaho, whom he considered
dog-eating invader scum.
The Yankee notion of lumping all tribes together led to
tragedy. Some kids from one tribe would swipe a couple of
cows from a wagon train. A few days later, miles down the
trail, other Indians
might appear. The white
pioneers would shoot in retribution for the theft -- firing
at people who had nothing to do with it, and indeed, at
people who might well have been glad to join in a raid
against the tribe which had committed the theft.
The white conception of Indians
is racism, pure
and simple -- lumping together the vast and diverse peoples
on the continent, and assuming they're all alike.
But that's a white problem. Putting one Indian on the presidential panel might be good public relations, but that's all. An honest effort would require representatives from scores of tribes, producing a group too large to accomplish much.
Not that the commission is going to accomplish much
anyway. It is chaired by historian John Hope Franklin, who
observed in USA Weekend recently that white Americans
shouldn't hide behind the rationale that their ancestors
didn't own slaves. They are the direct beneficiaries,
even in 1998, of the opportunities and greed that existed
in the 18th and 19th centuries. They need to see the
connection between slavery and their privilege
today.
Perhaps Dr. Franklin can show me this connection, because I see something quite different when I examine my own family tree and American history -- especially a fine book, Albion's Seed, by David Hackett Fischer.
The Quillens who arrived on these shores in 1755 were
Scotch-Irish Borderers.
They were easy to
distinguish from other Americans coming from the British
Isles: the New England Puritans, the Delaware Valley
Quakers and the Tidewater Cavaliers, all with distinctive
cultures.
Mortality in ships sailing from North Britain
approached that of the slave trade,
Fischer observes,
and upon arrival in the New World, they faced intense
prejudice from other ethnic groups
who described them
as the scum of the universe.
That hardly sounds like privilege,
and when we
move to the opportunities and greed
in the West a
century ago, we find a seething Populist revolt. For every
Rockefeller or Carnegie atop the economic pyramid, there
were millions of Americans, equally white, getting
shafted.
Often the capitalists imported in African-American laborers as strikebreakers, exacerbating the racism that already besmirched Populism.
This suggest that racism has persistently been employed by the American plutocracy as a divide-and-conquer tactic to keep the rabble, of whatever color, from uniting.
Indeed, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. saw it that
way. We recall King today as a fighter against racism, but
he also organized a multiracial army of the poor
to
march on Washington. True compassion,
King said,
is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to
see that an edifice which produces beggars needs
restructuring.
Like other prominent Americans who came to see that poor whites and poor blacks might make a common cause -- Abraham Lincoln, Huey Long, Bobby Kennedy -- King was shot.
Perhaps, then, John Hope Franklin is just being prudent when he ignores the real economic and social divisions which have little connection to race.
He finds it insulting to be taken for a bellhop -- that is, it's demeaning when a college professor is mistaken for someone performing honest work. Doesn't that tell us something -- more than a dozen presidential commissions would -- about where the major bigotry lies in America these days?
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